OS X Lion: 10 Killer New Features

[Phillip Swanson]

There are a bevy of new features available in OS X lion, 250 to be exact. But, at WWDC Phill Schiller only demonstrated 10 rather large, and upgrade worthy features.

Full Screen Mode: A ton of native apps now operate in a full screen mode. This eliminates scroll bars, and other needless clutter. With the new focus on gestures, who needs bars?

Gesture Support: Scroll bars are a thing of the past. Multi-Touch gestures are even more integrated into Lion

Mission Control: It’s essentially Expose and Spaces on steroids. Utilizing a bevy of gesture based controls users can highlight, zoom in, and manipulate the organization of open application while in expose. Also, widgets are displayed in the upper left corner, and the dock is now visible at all times. Super, super efficient.

LaunchPad: OS X Lion features a revamped way to launch applications on your Mac. Launchpad allows users to access all of their applications quickly with a simple gesture and then use this applications almost instantaneously. The screenshots we've got make it look very similar to the springboard in iOS. Apps downloaded from the Mac App Store fly onto the launchpad grid, it looks pretty neat.

Resume, Auto-Save, and Versioning: Lion features the ability for any application to resume right where you left off, even after it's been closed, again similar to backgrounded apps in iOS. Apple is clearly trying to eliminate any lost data with this feature, so hopefully the days of saying "I should have saved." are just about over. In a demo using Pages, documents were automatically autosaved, and allowed the user to "lock" the current version or revert to an older version of the same document. With this feature, it almost eliminates the need to even worrying about saving anymore.

Airdrop: Apple's attempt to make the thumb drive obsolete comes in the form of 'AirDrop' a new Wi-Fi based filesharing service to use between nearby Macs running Lion. There's no set-up, the Mac with AirDrop turned on, automatically discovers other Macs, and allows users to send files quickly and easily back and forth. Apple adds that the transfers fully encrypted.

Mail: The Mac mail application finally gets a much needed update. "With searching now we have new search suggestions. Mail recognizes whether that's a person or a subject... select one it becomes a search token." This statement alone garnered wild applause. The new layout also hides the redundant FWD, CCC, RE, and other useless info that can overwhelm lengthy email chains.

Mac App Store: Not really new, but it now comes standard with Lion, which will only be available for download via the Mac App Store as a $29 upgrade. Sweet.

[Phillip Swanson and Matt Savoca)

[DC5iPhone]

Seems like the same stuff they pushed out before... unimpressed.

[hookedonkronix]

Seems like the same stuff they pushed out before... unimpressed.

That's only 10 out of 250

[cockyjeremy]

I would have been happier if we saw NEW features in Lion shown, not ones they showed us months ago. Even if they were less important features.

[MetallicaFan1991]

This was the worst WWDC by Apple tbh.

2010 was the best!

[vantheman169]

This was the worst WWDC by Apple tbh.

2010 was the best!

I agree, no new hardware announcement? BOOOO but Lion looks like a nice update!

[silkd]

When "full screen apps" is in the top ten features, it is truly a sad day for apple. At least the upgrade will only cost $30.

[brownan]

can't wait to get Lion, and its so cheap too!

[CrunchDude]

I'm glad it's not much different because Snow Leopard is pretty darn awesome. I've been running Lion primarily since DP3 and it runs super smooth. It boots into the 64-bit kernel by default and iTunes 10.5 is 64-bit. It is all around faster and the attention to detail is visible everywhere and it all kind of makes sense and the fluidity makes it even more enjoyable to use than SL.

The additional 3, 4, and 5 finger gestures are exactly what I wanted and they are ALL extremely useful and not just for show. Until now, you used to have to install extra software for additional gestures, but Lion includes the ones that make sense. There's more eye candy, too, though, which is always most welcome.

iOS 5 has some major features, yes, but again, as with Lion, you can look forward to lots and lots of refinements.

I liked WWDC '11 but I agree, we had known about much of it already, especially OS X Lion.

[Dorkenstein909]

WAIT but, what if the OS gets screwed up and I need to boot from a disc? use my old leopard disc?????????